drewish.com

i'm back

well i'm back in the states and due to over booking the proud bearer of a $200 credit on delta.

Day 13 (A whole lot of flying)

As I was giving the hostel room the final check for any thing I might have left behind I realized that I'd left The Art of Programming Vol 2 at Dan's house. I then realized that inside of that was a couple hundred dollars that I'd stashed there along with my "eTicket". There really wasn't much I could do, the bus ride to San Sebastian was 4+ hours and 25 bucks both ways, I had to hope for the best.

Even more troublesome was the lack of a box for my bike, Dan had ridden over to meet me at the bus station and we'd trashed the box rather than try to haul it on the 10 minute bike ride to his apartment. It was already badly beaten from the airline and hauling it to the bus so it didn't seem like a big loss. The only problem was that I lagged getting a replacement for it in San Sebastion, in fact I didn't ever get around to it, we figured we'd have time in Madrid.

We were up and gone by 08:15, Lilly and Dan's bus left at 09:00 and I needed to be checked in for my plane around that time.

[reading the dune book]

When I checked in for my flight to Reno, they said they were looking for volunteers to take a later flight because they were over booked. I asked how much the credit was for and it turned out that they'd give you $200 and a dinner to take a flight 4 hours later. Since this trip was made possible by a $400 credit from a previous trip I called and left a message for Charles to pick me up later and signed up.

The meal ticket they'd given me was for $13, I was pretty supprised. In the past those meal tickets were for $7 or so, hardly enough to buy an airport sandwich.

I found my gate and wandered around in search of an electrical outlet to recharge my laptop. [talking with people in the slc airport.]

I saw this guy standing at the ticket counter that looked really familiar but I couldn't decide where I knew the face from. After I'd given up on it the guy next to me asked if I thought I'd recognize Larry Byrd if I saw him. I looked up and replied that if it wasn't him probably been mistaken for him enough that the novelty was gone. I later overheard the flight attendants saying that it wasn't him, apparently he few this flight weekly so they all had their "Larry" stories.

Day 12 (Walking around Madrid)

[up late arrrg]

[wandering around Madrid]

[record stores, not ice cream, falafel]

[drinking 40s going to see movies]

Day 11 (Back to Madrid)

[up way fucking early]

[saw the jap tourist bus. (everyone had been telling us how the spainard are pretty racists, that they actually had yellow bus with a bunch of japanese tourists on it taking pictures)]

[went to store]

[buying stuff]

[boxing up bike]

[bus ride]

[guy falling off roof]

[food, not indian too expensive, potatoes instead]

[saw the movie snatch (and they had movie bathrooms in the back of each theater with speakers so you could hear what was going on while you peed; which was good because we'd drank 40s before the movie.)]

Day 10 (Back to France)

[slept]

[france with Yosune]

[meeting up with everyone, no 40s]

[back to exacalte]

Day 09 (Beach)

The beach was the destination for today. We walked around the bay, went in a looked at the tide pools, walked over to the famous Windcomber sculptures.

[statues]

[watched dusk to dawn. one word: bad]

[tetris]

Day 08 (France)

Woke up to all of Dan's housemates blasting really shitty Spanish music.

The weather is really shitty again today so we got this good idea that we should go to France. Just in case you were wondering it was shitty weather in France too. I forgot my socks, camera and book so I was kind of annoyed.

Mel was leaving for Barcelona so Dan, Lilly and I met her, Bob, Aaron, Airielle and Erick for Chinese food. Afterwards we all went to the Ondarra to have a few drinks and play chess. [hanging out] Some people went home early but Lilly and I walked over to Erick's apartment with Bob and Aaron.

Day 07 (Domingo)

The problem with Dawn's cave of a room is that it has absolutely no windows, you can't tell if it's 06:00 or 14:00. Lilly and I were laying there kind of dozing and she asks "Did you know it's 2pm?".
"Umm no I was waiting for Dawn to get up."
"She got up a while ago."
"Oh..."

So then we both got up and ate a bit of breakfast. It was raining so we weren't planning to do much, I started trying to catch up on this journal thing and composing some emails. Lilly cut off some of her hair. Dan came over and he and I went down to the internet cafe and I sent out emails and uploaded pictures of Dan's mullet. Mel and Aaron walked in and we started talking to them and decided to go get a video for later that night then meet everyone at a bar called Bukowski (named after Charles).

Got over there and the place was in the middle of a football party. It reminded me of going to Tacos Del Ray on a Sunday afternoon. Bukowski is one of the better bars I've been in, cheap beers, good music, the only down side is it's out of the way.

We all walked over to Airielle's apartment in the rain to watch Paris, Texas. Over all it was good but it was long (2:15) and very slow. Dan Lilly and I walked back to his house and went to sleep.

well since i've been here

well since i've been here i've watched dan go through the stages of the mullet. first he had a pretty cool pompador one, he cut it down to a scarry looking one, and then down to a basque seperatist mullet.

we've been doing quite a bit of drinking, the schedule goes something like this wake up between 12:00 and 14:00 walk around a bit, maybe do a little climbing or some erands, meet everyone at about 20:00 and get some food and beer or wine then go party till about 04:00. Get some sleep and repeat the next day, it's pretty great. oh yes i mentioned climbing, the cool thing about all this masonry is that you can climb on it and it makes a good traverse.

the thing that sucks about internet cafes is the people that come in. i'm sitting between one american girl telling another who's left on survior.

when every my brother charles and i are in a foriegn country we'll walk around trying to spot americans. you only are sure once you hear them talk so we won't say a thing and if we do it's as quite as we can.

below are the stages of dan's mullet

first the pompador, second the rat job, third the basque seperatist youth mullet.

the spaniards love it, but the rest of us think it looks ratty.

Day 06 (Saturday/Sabado)

Woke up really late about 13:00 got my first shower and need to leave to meet everyone who was going to be at Airielle's for pancakes.

Actually we enjoyed pancakes and potatoes, and Aaron made this strawberry stuff that went great on bread or on crackers. It turns out that Dawn "bottle breaking" Adams is in no trouble. Apparently the cops went and looked at it and decided that while no window was broken they should just fuck with her.

I finally got to play Tony Hawk Skate Pro on the PlayStation, and man is that a crack pipe you don't want to hit. I sat there for about an hour until we decided to go to the beach. It was nice, I sort of dozed off and on hoping I wouldn't end up with sunburn on my back.

Dan and I went to climb at this other spot on the coast. When you're climbing in the gym you see holds that look like someone made just because they'd be an interesting hold but would never exist in nature. This rock was just gorgeous and was covered with exactly that sort of hold. The landing was a sort of grim cement so it was hard to push yourself, but we toped out on one of the easier problems. We told everyone we'd meet them at the bouldering wall but wanted to get up there early to do a bit of the traverse.

The beer, wine and bagel chips (they go by a different name here) showed up and it was good, Bob even brought bean dip. I'd like to have a moment of silence for Bob's bean dip, it was wonderful and it's passing was great loss. Well spend some more time drinking, insert a stop or to at Bar Narrika, perhaps ending up at Etxekalte for a bit and you've got an idea how we passed the night.

At some point these Spaniards came running through the courtyard carpet and started playing fuck around games with each other. Dan convinced me to go pick up the carpet, I did a bit of running around with it then proceeded to pack it up on my backpack to take home. After carrying it around for a bit I became too big of a pain in the ass so I gave it to Bob. He then did his interpretation of Swan Lake, it really was inspiring to watch Bob leaping about like that, twirling and flapping his carpet covered wings.

Day 05

Woke up at Dawn's apt and really needed some coffee, Joe Lane has got me hooked totally hooked.

Dawn Lilly and I took the bus back to Dan's apt to get lunch at the macrobiotic restaurant, Dan's landlady owns. The macrobiotic school of thought has one bit of advice that I'm totally stoked on. You're supposed to chew each bite of food 100 times before swallowing it. I end up full before I finish my meal. Hopefully I'll remember to keep doing it.

We went over to the climbing store and looked at gear it's so unbelievably cheap. I got 5.10's top of the line shoe for $80, I wonder if my brother would like a crash pad... <grin>

Met up with some other people and grabbed some coffee on the way and walked up to the bouldering wall and Dan and I fucked around on it. It's a pretty nice traverse...

Went back to Dawn's house and made pasta, it was super good. Then the nightly circuit of the bars began.

On the way back may hem was in the air we'd been watching Spaniards doing stupid drunken stuff all night, I kicked a couple of broken bottles and then 20m from her apt Dawn starts screaming about the killing the whores and throws this bottle and then runs. Well the Spanish are scared shitless of the ETA setting off a bomb so they've got more undercover cops that you'd ever guess. As you can now imagine when she starts running and we follow they're going to grab her.

She lucked out and didn't get taken in, but other than that I'm not sure what will happen, if her program gets wind of it she'll get kicked out. That would be super crappy at this point because she's got two weeks left. Hopefully she'll just have to pay for the window some fine and leave it at that.

lilly is having a great

lilly is having a great time in spain

this image makes a great desktop background click on it to see the fullsize image.

i helped the guy at the internet cafe that dan frequents get his webcam going, you might be able to see me on it sometime.

Day 04 (San Sebastian)

In the interest of keeping Dan's landlady happy, and just because he really likes it, we went to her restaurant. The food was really good and it only cost 1200 pesetas. I've started figuring the prices of stuff in relation to the price of beer (approximately 350 pesetas). The Restaurante Macrbiotika lands right at about 3 beers, which is kind of expensive but as I said the food is very good.

Dan, Lilly and I packed up our stuff and went down to the beach. Lilly went off to make a phone call so we had her get some 40s and sat around watching the Italians on the beach play fuck-around games and enjoyed the fact that Spanish beaches are topless.

After getting a bit so sun we left to meet Airielle at her apartment. Dan went off to school and we went with Airielle to get some of my money changed. Initially I was planning to only bring about $200. My dad got all worried that I wasn't going to be able to get money off my various cards and started guilt tripping me to take more cash. Well it turns out that in fact you can get cash very easily from the ATMs and the exchange rate is much better. So if you learn anything from reading this just don't underestimate your Visa card. Oh and it was even more annoying because when I arrived changed some money at the airport, 185 pesetas to the dollar, at this place 175 to the dollar. Ouch.

With me getting raped by the moneychangers taken care of, we went off to get beer, wine and food for Mel's quote unquote birthday party. The plan was to watch the sunset, we walked up the Jesus Mountain and met up with a bunch of people and worked our way through most of the wine and beer and a bit of pot as well (it's sort of legal here). The sunset was totally unremarkable so at this point it was time for pinchos so we headed for the Bar Narrika.

After picking up some new 40s we walked down to the pier and sat and drank for a bit. The pier happens to be right next to Etxekalte, the club that all the kids here really like. Thursdays aren't that crowded so we went in and Dawn and I rocked out while most everyone else went home. Lilly sat down on the floor and went to sleep, when we found her there were a couple of Spaniards staring at her and a few bags and coats laying on top of her.

Day 03 (San Sebastian)

I woke up at around 10:00 with Dan walking around getting ready for school. He was telling us stuff we could do today, eat at the lady who owns the house's vegan restaurant 13:00-15:00, go to the beach. Then meet him at the McDonalds at 18:15. I promptly fell back a sleep till Lilly woke me up at 15:00, we're bumbed we missed out on lunch there.

We walked around and found a supermarket and bought some food then walked down to the surfer beach to eat it. We walked around some more and then met Dan. He was with Dawn Adams (another person from Galena High School), we all walked half way up the Jesus Mountain to the wall that Dan boulders on. We all tried traversing on it for a bit then walked back down.

Lilly and Dawn went over to Dawn's apartment and Dan and I went to the Internet cafe. Dan seems to think that the owner looks like my dad, I didn't see the similarity. He had a web cam that he was trying to get going. The shitty software he was using wouldn't work behind his proxy so I set him up a geocities account and got some different web cam software going. Those Spanish keyboards suck for trying to code HTML. Windows in Spanish was kind a weird, I realized how little I read the words.

We went back to Ariel's (that's not how you spell her name) apartment for dinner. Everyone brought food (some how it was all salad) and then we watched Goodfellas. I'd never seen the whole movie, every other gangster film seems like a tribute to or parody of it.

We all went over to the same bar as the night before to celebrate Mel's birthday. It was fun but unremarkable. On the way home I showed Lilly that the chips from the night before did in fact have Jamon mentioned clearly on the front.

New phrase I heard some Swedish girl say that I'm going to start using "It's no orgasm".

Day 02 (Still traveling)

God I'm about ready to turn a round and rip that bandana of the head of that freaking 10 year old. Tray goes down bang! Tray goes up bang! Pull up on seat. Repeat.

Going through customs sucked. I got in the wrong line, I watched 30 or 40 people walk through the other lines while I waited. Then I spent another 15 minutes finding the metro (hauling the box with the bike in it) and then got off at the wrong stop causing me to have to try to force my way back on (with that humongous box) to the next train. By the time I found the place to buy tickets for the bus I was 15 minutes late for the 09:00 bus that Dan wanted me to catch. I tried to call him but I can't figure out the phones.

My 4000 pesta bus ticket is for 11:00 so I've got some time to type. I'm thinking about unpacking the bike and going up to street level to look around. Hauling the bike by itself is no problem it's just this box that's a pain.

Couple of notes:

• Everyone on the subway reads, I tried to take a picture of it but I'm not sure how it'll turn out.
• There are a large number of these swarthy Spaniards that look disturbingly like brad from a distance.
• My three years of public school Spanish are coming back to me nicely.

I couldn't stay awake on the bus ride, even though they showed a movie with Penelope Cruz (and there were several topless scenes), I slept for most of the 5 hour ride. Dan met me right as I got off the bus, his fucking pompadour was fucking disgusting.

We unpacked the folding bike and I rode with him over to his house. He's living with this nice lady and her daughter. I guess the daughter speaks English, but the mother speaks about as much English as I do Spanish.

We woke Lilly up walked down to the store and some 40s and took them over to the "world's worst half pipe". Sitting around drinking took it back to the day.

Dan left to go to school and Lilly and I ended up walking around trying to find some menthol cigarettes. She swore she'd seen tobacco store but just couldn't remember quite where. We wandered around in the now drizzling rain looking for one. I was supper hungry by this point and just wanted a sandwich.

We started wandering around the old part of the city looking for the tobacco shop and kept running into people that Lilly either knew, Regan and Stephanie, or had already met, Eric at the Internet Cafe. Eric, was very helpful in finding a place to buy Lilly's cigarettes.

With that taken care of we started off to find the English bar Lilly had seen earlier. More wandering ensued and after some Basque kids tried to sell us hash we found the bar. It was super-expensive and the beers tasted, as Lilly put it, "like blood", we didn't stay long.

We decided to call Dan "I'm paying for this call by the minute" Gingold to ask where the restaurant that he and Lilly had gotten a vegan sandwich at was. Lilly talked to him and found out when and where we'd be meeting later but forgot to ask about the restaurant.

She went back into the internet cafe and asked Eric where it was. Once we got there I mustered my three years of Spanish and tried to figure out how to order a sandwich (bocadillo) with no meat, cheese or sour cream. We ended up with a mystery sandwich, I'm not sure what it was but it had mayonnaise on it so Lilly wasn't stoked.

Dan had told us to meet him at the McDonalds at 18:15 so we headed over there. We met this girl Mel who was from Boston who'd been here last semester and back visiting. Soon some other kids in the program showed up, I met Aaron from Ohio, Katie from who knows where and Bob and Airielle from Boise, Idaho.

We went over to Airielle's apartment to have some wine and beer. Lilly and Katie starting drinking the little bottles from this flavored alcohol tasters set. Apparently they brought them with them when we went to the Caledonian [Bar] because when the bar maid found them she started screaming about how in Espa�a you don't do that, I tried to explain that in Los Estados Unidos you don't do that either but she didn't really want to hear it.

Day 01 (Traveling)

Waiting at the airport in Reno to leave I ran into Steve Martens who I knew from Galena. He was there meeting his roomate who was comming in on my plane. I talked to him and his other roomate for about an hour since my plane was a half hour late.

Slept the whole way to DFW probably for the best. ended up having to cough up $10 for breakfast at the airport, that hurt. I forgot to order vegetarian meals on the plane so I've been staring at chicken at every meal.

I'm stuck on the flight from JFK to MAD with a bunch of swarthy Itallians and Spainards. I don't think any of them value showering or deodorant. Not that I really do either but if I'd known I wouldn't have showered before I left. At least the kid behind me quit kicking my seat. Oh wait I spoke too soon, it's a long flight.